Nasher Sculpture Center

This is one of six known plaster casts that Brancusi made at an early date from the first of several versions of The Kiss (1907-08), his first true masterpiece. The original stone carving is in the Muzeul de Arta at Craiova, Rumania. Brancusi recalled beginning work on this sculpture in 1907 but also sometimes gave its date as 1908 (see Geist, 1983, cat. no. 55). The chronology of ensuing versions of The Kiss is problematic but has been worked out most authoritatively by Sidney Geist: he dates the slightly larger and more primitivized stone version in the Diamond collection about 1908 (Geist, 1983, cat. no. 57), the still larger stone monument in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, 1909 (Geist, cat. no. 68), and the stone version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art 1912 (Geist, cat. no. 81). Other, still later variations on the same theme provide evidence of its consuming hold on Brancusi's creative imagination. In conversations with the author (June 1985), Geist confirmed that Brancusi made the plasters himself soon after the carving of the original stone, most likely as a sign of affection for the original and as a means of extending his involvement with the project. They also made more works available for public exhibition. Brancusi frequently gave his plasters away as gifts but regarded them as self-sufficient art works, sometimes putting a price on them in exhibitions. He included a plaster of this version of The Kiss in the Armory Show of 1913 (probably the Rockefeller-Latner cast), and showed the present plaster in an exhibition of modern art at the Manes Society in Prague in 1914, subsequently giving it to the exhibition's organizer, Alexandre Mercereau. Erosion along the top surfaces and certain driplike stains on the Nasher cast indicate that at some point it was placed outdoors.

The Kiss responds in a primitive mode to Auguste Rodin's famous marble Kiss of 1888, but its rough surface, squat proportions, and blunt expressiveness counter the sweet, fluid grace of the Rodin. Numerous sources have been proposed as possible influences, to which could be added the double tikis and net weights with two joined figures from the Hiva Islands in Polynesia. Almost certainly inspired in part by André Derain's carved Crouching Man of 1907, The Kiss breaks irrevocably with the tradition of Rodin, locking in its compact form a tender idyll on the unity of love, and announcing Brancusi's penchant for the simplified and primitive, for direct carving, and for poetic symbolism, traits that would mark his work for the rest of his life.